Analysing the monetization of Fallout Shelter

[Music] [Applause] [Music] Hello and welcome to Pocket Gamer's Monetizer. We're just going to have a quick look um at Bethesda's Fallout Shelter. But before we look at the game itself, we're just going to look at our Monetizer graphs. So um looks looks kind of pretty, doesn't it? But um let's let's do a quick explanation of what it is and compare Fallout Shelter to some other to some other games. So these are just basically some measurements that we take um from from all the games that we that we study. Um they're broken down into you can kind of see um we'll sort of see that there's four different kind of colors on there. So starting in this corner um this is what we kind of look at our kind of efficiency um or the idea is it's kind of code efficiency some some idea of efficiency um and on this line here is the load time. So um is in seconds and averaged over over a few loads. Um, so Fallout Shelter takes about about 70 seconds to load, which is quite a long time for for what is a fairly um easy game and it's actually

one of these games where um it loads kind of a loading screen and then you have to tap again to load further. So that kind of um well that kind of makes it longer but equally um you know it's kind of a cunning way making you think um maybe it's not as long as as it first appears. Um this graph here is the um this line here sorry is the size on device. So, I'm using iPhone iPad 3 and it's about 700 um megabytes. So, it's a fairly large game as well, which is again quite surprising because it's not a 3D game. It's a fairly simple 2D game. Um this one here is one we call Bloat and Bloat is um compares what the App Store um size is given as. In this case, it's just under 200 megabytes. Um and so almost up to 700. So, you get a bloat of um 3.6 almost four. So, here we see quite a big area and that suggests that the game Fallout Shelter is not a particularly well engineered game. this area here, the pink one, we can't really we can't actually measure port shelter in this one. So, this line here is called reciprocity. And reciprocity

is um how much um kind of hard currency the game gives you measured in dollars. And the reason you can't do this for Fallout Shelter is Fallout Shelter has a hard currency caps, but you can't buy them directly. So, you buy lunch boxes which have caps and other things in them. Um so um if you I guess if you bought enough um lunch boxes you could kind of work out a rough dollar to caps measurement but um it's quite hard to do potentially be quite expensive. So we haven't done that. So we haven't got any idea about reciprocity. Um and this one here is called is called the discount currency ratio and this is two and that's so this is um how much um compared to the the cheapest inapp purchase compared to most expensive inapp purchase how much um hard currency extra you get kind of thing. Um we can't measure this directly but um in this case when you buy things you don't buy the caps the hard currency you buy lunch boxes and if you spend $20 which is the most expensive in app purchase you get twice as much as if you spend $1 the cheapest one. So that's we have a um discount uh currency ratio of two which

is about average not bad. And coming to this blue thing this blue thing is an idea of um the download. So this graph here is kind of a basically a ratio of um how many um countries the game has gone um top 10 top 100 uh downloads and this line here is how it's done in the top grossing charts and this basically here is a ratio of the two. So we can see here um it's actually quite so one is obviously the most you you can get in terms of this being a ratio. So um Fallout Shutter is very close on iPhone it's about 0.5 I think 04 um uh and on iPad it's 7. So very high downloads. That's what we expect. We kind of know that. Um but the interesting thing sometimes you get very high downloads. Often that doesn't pay through to top grossing with with full it does. So you can see this kind of cross-hatch areas kind of an idea of where we kind of see a successful game would be in this crosshatch area. So clearly we can see Fallout Shelter is in the successful game area. That's no surprise everyone. Everyone knows Fort Shel's been successful. This ratio one is trying to get an idea of how many of

how well downloads have been monetized. um in this case kind of fairly well really not brilliantly but fairly well. Um and this kind of little orange one here this is the most interesting perhaps. So this is us measuring the inapp purchase economy as we call it. So this is how many bands of purchases there are. There's only three different three different um purchases you can sorry four different purchases you can do in in Fallout Shelter. And what's interesting is the cheapest one is $1, which is pretty cheap. Most games now have $5. And most expensive, even more surprisingly, is $20, which is here. And then this one's the average under 10. So the average is $9 for in that purchase. This is very tiny. And what's particularly interesting is this is very small to generate this large um kind of revenue in in sense this kind of level. You'd kind of think they'd be losing some money because most games will have $100 um as as the largest inapp purchase. So we can compare this. This is Fallout Sh. So you can kind of get rock with that. But let's quickly compare it with some other games. So this is Kabam's Marvel of Marvel Contest of Champions. So we can see here I mean this is these are all very pretty

successful games we're looking at. So again we're kind of seeing quite a large blue area here. Fairly successful game probably I mean people this game doing tens of millions of of dollars a month. Um so if we kind of see this green area here it's a bit smaller. So it's um on device it's about 500 megabytes. Um and the bloat's only kind of 1.7. So we can see kind of the different green area there. You see we got bit reciprocity here. So you get about $2 worth just under $2 of hard currency. Um but the the um discount currency ratio is much smaller. So it's a 1.15 compared to two Fortnite shelter. But the most interesting difference obviously you can see this massive orange area. So this is what we see in most games. You have a minimum inapp purchase of $5. You have a maximum of $100. So this is five bands that's $5. And then you get an average of around about 35. So I think it's like actually $39. So just comparing the two again, you know, you can just see that's the that's the big difference. And quick look again. Um so this is um Boom Beach from um uh Supercell. So the difference here

I guess another big area here we're going up to $100 um successful here. Respocity is again about the same actually as um as Kabam's Marvel Marvel games. Um getting about $2 of of currency um in your your discount currency ratio about 1.4. But what's really interesting with Boom Beach is very very tightly designed very very well designed well engineered. So it's only 100 megabytes of download. It's only 135 megabytes on device. So very tiny bloat. That's the difference. So you see these two big differences here and here. So um that's just these graphs just give us an idea of how to kind of analyze the games. Not particularly um you can't analyze the game and from these areas and say how it's going to be successful. Um it's not that kind of predictive thing, but um that is kind of roughly how we use them. Let's quickly go in have a quick look. Um, so let's start up um Fallout Shelter. Okay, let's get that in the middle. Let me switch that off.

Okay, so we can see it's loading. Um, put some volume on. And we can see as we kind of discussed this loading screen is quite nice, quite ornate, but it does take a long time and I think this is partly because it's a big quite a big game. Um, so this is the first thing. So we've loaded this and they have to enter the vault with this again. So we're waiting and please stand by. Um, so in a sense the kind of interesting thing about Fallout Shelter is it's been successful um despite these kind of um what would be traditionally seen as obstacles. you know, you want people to get in the game pretty quickly in general. Um, particularly a game like watch out where you're not spending probably not spending a lot of time in the game. It's quite a quick in and out. Um, you're going into it many times a day really to check on your resources. Um, so we're going to come on. We're standing by.

I guess this is a slightly older device. This is an iPad 3. This is the minimum spec it will run on. So presumably it will run fairly fast on iPad Air2s, but people are playing on these things. So here's my This is pretty pathetic shelter. Um, but we get an idea about what's going on here. So this is my shel. This is my shelter. The guys are underground. See my I haven't been playing this very much. 10% F. I'm a fail failure. Um, all my guys in here are very unhappy. Um, yeah. So I'm going to collect some resources. You can see here it's kind of different type of it's not resource in the same way it is for other games. So, but you're kind of supposed to keep your meter's heart into the It shouldn't be in the red, they should be in the green um to keep my uh inhabitants happy. Um let me collect some of those. Let's level some of these guys up. Um look, I've got some coin some some caps. So, this is um I've got 19 people in there. They're very unhappy. Let's quickly um well, this is the different things I can build. So, say build a science lab. Let's stick

it on there. So, it's used up my caps. So, the interesting thing here is caps there's only currencies as caps and caps used for everything. Um, and you don't really earn a lot of caps to be to be honest. I think this where the monetization is quite clever that um you do really need caps if you want to play this game a lot. You do need to spend money really. Um because it's quite hard to grind out. I think particularly in the early stages where I am um because you kind of get a bit stuck. Um, but anyway, so we go here and I haven't got any lunch boxes. So, so you can see here, this is obviously in UK pounds. So, that there's four different ones I can buy. For the first one's n dollar, $1, I get one lunch box. For the $4, $5, I get five lunch boxes. For the $10, I get 15. And for the $20, I get 40. So, you can see there's different ratio. So, this is 50% off. That's where our ratio comes from. Um, and you see I haven't got any. Haven't got any only have to buy them. Um, and so that's uh, yeah, that's really the um the the interesting thing.

So, I'm collecting some some caps here, but not really got enough to do anything. Um, so that's just a quick look at Fallout Shelter. Quite kind of different to other games. There's no multiplayer in here. Um, is a very singular type of type of game. I mean, uh, there's a bit more to do than than I've been doing, but you're basically just building a shelter and leveling the guys up. Um, and you can send people out into the into the, uh, wilderness to try and track stuff down. And if you have a nice shelter, if you have higher higher than 10%, people will come and join your join your shelter. But, um, yeah. So, there we go. That was a quick look at Fallout Shelter and a quick look at it monetization. [Applause]